There is a need for improved mechanisms for digital drawing, painting and writing technologies. The information contained in a graphical or painted image (color or monochromatic) cannot be explained, interpreted or communicated by other means, for example by voice, for inputting digital information into a computer nearly as effectively as with the graphical or painted image.
However, until now all painting art is two-dimensional due to the two-dimensional nature of all known canvases (more precisely, drawing surface, even if it is not a plane but, for example, a cylindrical, spherical or other curved surface). One of the challenges of painting always was how to create an image of the third dimension, the illusion of depth of a picture. Although a number of great painters achieved fantastic results in this endeavor, nevertheless the interest in three-dimensional visual images resulted in art forms such as sculpture and architecture. However, painted sculptures didn't receive wide acceptance. Then, realization of three-dimensional or stereo vision, with the advent of photography, when two photo-cameras, spaced at a distance of about the distance between the human eyes, made two pictures. These pictures are viewed through the stereoscope, which was invented in 1838.
Progress in stereo photography (both stereo photographs and stereo motion pictures) has been made over the last 170 years. The most recent improvements in three-dimensional movies and three-dimensional TV are making an interest in these technologies even greater, as they become available in consumer products.
However, there remains a need for improvements in three-dimensional painting mostly because nothing changed in dimensionality of the two-dimensional canvas for painting.
There are several challenges to solving the problem of three-dimensional free-hand painting and drawing. The first challenge is a three-dimensional canvas for a free-hand painting and drawing on or within this canvas.
It is hard to imagine, from an existing technology viewpoint, a kind of media suitable for a true three-dimensional (cube) canvas, transparent and allowing for penetration into the cube with a brush, making a stroke of paint, and removing the brush without disturbing the rest of the media (i.e., drawing or painting). It sounds like science fiction, at least from the viewpoint of existing technology and known materials other than painted sculptures, requiring making of a sculpture, and then painting of such sculpture.
As known, depth perception, as visual ability to perceive the world in three dimensions arises from a variety of depth cues. From all the depth cues both monocular and binocular stereopsis found the most practical applications. Stereopsis is the process in visual perception leading to the sensation of depth from the two slightly different projections of the world onto the retinas of the two eyes. The differences in the two retinal images are called horizontal disparity, retinal disparity, or binocular disparity. The differences arise from the eyes' different positions in the head.
These two images corresponding to different visions of the right and left eyes are relatively easy to create by stereo-photography or stereo-movie by taking two pictures simultaneously with two cameras separated horizontally similar to two separated eyes. However, it is hard to imagine how an artist can paint two paintings of the same image on two different canvases for two eyes such that they later could be viewed with one of the stereoscopic viewing systems.
As long as art of painting exists, almost all artists have been trying to perfect techniques for a three-dimensional illusion on a two-dimensional canvas, demonstrating the long-felt need for a three-dimensional painting technique. Therefore, there is a need for creating a method and system for three-dimensional painting and drawing.